10.27.06

So you want to know what life is like in the Utha Jazz locker room? Jarron Collins has a suggestion for you: Rent the movie “Babel,” the Brad Pitt/Cate Blanchett thriller.

I was talking to Andrei Kirilenko before Tuesday’s game — actually, it was a little disconcerting because he was lying on the floor doing situps at the time — and he was having trouble expressing what he meant. He was comparing the role of a team captain in Europe with his role as a team captain on the Jazz, but he couldn’t find the words to express himself.

But Collins, sitting nearby, could. He explained what Kirilenko was trying to say, while Kirilenko listened and said, yes, yes, that’s it. So I told Collins I was impressed with his ability to interpret, sort of, for his teammates.

That’s when Collins explained that the Jazz’s locker room reminded him of “Babel.” Without the gunfire, he means.

With a Croat (Gordan Giricek), Turk (Mehmet Okur) and a Russian (Kirilenko) on the roster, not to mention former teammates like Raul Lopez, Sasha Pavlovic and Carlos Arroyo, “there’s a lot of miscommunication sometimes, a lot of things that aren’t quite understood. Because even though everyone speaks English well, there are a lot of subtleties that get missed.”